Accumulation and Momentum: ART021 Shanghai 2025
Author / Louis Lu
The 2025 Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting revealed significant shifts in collector demographics and spending. Despite economic uncertainty in 2024 and 2025, Gen Z collectors reported higher-than-average spending at 26 percent. Additionally, women spent 46 percent more than men, outpacing them in both Gen Z and millennial segments. Most notably, the highest spending by a considerable margin came from collectors in mainland China, driven primarily by women whose average expenditures were more than double that of men. These findings point to a transformation in the collecting landscape, where the rise of millennials and Gen Z may signal diversifying tastes and modes of engagement with art. As women collectors achieve unprecedented visibility and influence, they are also championing female artists’ work. These shifts were evident throughout the fair in the galleries’ selections and who they chose to spotlight.
Across ART021, Gen Z artists were gaining visibility and commercial traction. BANK gallery presented a solo booth by Wenjue, an artist born in 2001, whose new body of work draws from childhood trading card battle games, incorporating visual languages from contemporary anime, religious altarpiece painting, and medieval illuminated manuscripts. These works explore the relationship between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional relief through the physical buildup of paint and tactile surface treatment, resulting in images with both visual impact and symbolic depth.
